I have shared my experience of teaching kids geometry in spare time, in this post. Would love to hear from others who have tried this and have learnt things that work vs things that don't
This is IMO a big deal because MSFT will now own business identity. Linkedin will become your business ID regardless of which company you join. Owning identity that travels across companies is incredibly powerful. This is a huge upgrade to AD. It's provisioned, verified (socially) and serves as a huge data source.
this is so awesome. My wife and I have been thinking and working on how can family productivity be improved. It's not an easy task as we are figuring out. There was a recent blog post that became reasonably popular. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/where-slack-moms-slackformoms...
The challenge I feel is to determine if one should take a broad-based approach to family productivity that addresses all aspects or should one take a narrow high-value problem and solve for improving the productivity of that task. We have approached it from the point of view of making kids' activity planning as a task easier. We are going into beta in a week or so. We'll know if this works.
Great job Kalid. I try to do this with kids. Simple ideas like why anything to power zero is 1 ? why do we need complex numbers ? Why is limit of something tending to zero/infinity even an interesting and useful concept ?
Thanks. It's great exploring these "What if?" questions with kids (or adults). Math becomes more like a world to explore than something we're supposed to "learn".
One of the analogies i gave to the kids was that why did man have to learn to travel by water. Because walking on land wouldn't get them to the other island. Complex numbers sometimes sometimes are used to get to islands that aren't accessible from working with regular numbers. I was obviously referring to finding roots to cubic equations using complex numbers. Using complex numbers is in some cases like walking on water :-). These are not exact but they make kids excited. The fact that Math is replete with hacks just like real world is something that needs to be made more vivid and interesting
I think in general working with large IT firms is always going to be a CF regardless of where they are from. This is especially true if you are a product dev shop as against enterprise IT. I think a better comparison would be small sized companies in India with the ones in Romania. I am not defending Indian outfits. I tend to agree that it is hard to find great tech companies to work with in India. But I suspect some of that has to do with just the sheer volume of tech outfits in India. As with anything its hard to keep average quality high with scale. Infosys used to be a top company on top tech campuses like IITs in mid 90s. I can tell you some of the guys who joined where absolute top notch tech guys back then. Those days are long gone. The issues that you point often are an outcome of working with incompetent or unmotivated folks. The best talent in India now works for companies that are catering to the local market (Snapdeal, Flipkart, Ola Cabs). So you may be better off looking at countries where top talent still is in the outsourcing business because local market doesn't offer enough returns for their talent.
What about search going social. It seems to me that I find a lot of my information on the social media now like Facebook. It just seems like i search a lot less now than i used to. Its not that people search on social media. I get fed information relentlessly and i have little time or energy left to google anything.
I’d argue on-premise software, as a category, was a bigger bubble than what we have today in tech. It delivered little value to the end-user but the companies that sold them were commanding huge valuations for years because of the huge margins that they were able to charge.
Wow. Well that's a pretty strong claim. I'd really like to see some kind of proof.
Unless I misunderstand you, you are claiming that companies like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP were (are?) overvalued.
You are also claiming that their software delivered little value.
Those are some pretty bold claims, and I don't think you've made the case well enough for them to stand up.
I think that you point about usage being a good indicator of future revenue is somewhat correct, but the really valuable analysis would be to show the types of services where usage is a good indicator of future value and ones where it isn't.
I think my points are made at a macro level and not at a specific company level. There is no fool-proof proof to any business/economic hypothesis. Oracle, MSFT and SAP aren't the only companies that make up on-prem software. But even with these companies shelf-ware is rampant. It took large internet companies to come up with competitive stacks to break these virtual monopolies. Having said that your point on making a stronger case is well taken. My bigger point is that the the current trend is less of a bubble than the era of on-prem software - this is a macro level observation. There were company level bubbles then and there are now. I am not commenting on specific companies here at least.
Do you mean because it's a great sentence in the context of this essay (maybe the best one in it), but you judge that you couldn't get away with saying it verbatim in conversation?
(If you were explaining the idea in this essay?) Or please explain.
I actually love the sentence but I wouldn't expect it in spoken english. (That part is ironical in the sense that it goes against the core of the article.. Seems like an exception that proves the rule). Written word gives the reader more time to absorb the content than spoken word and hence I feel it is OK to use metaphorical language to make the point and make the reading experience delightful. But Paul's point is well taken that it's better not to use flowery language for most of the time. It takes a lot of skill to not go overboard with that thing.
Yes, you make a good point. Also, since the reader can glance up and down the page, you don't have to repeat parts you have just stated very clearly, to make sure they're still with you, as you might while you talk. (You can do it briefly however.) In all, I expect my books to sound quite different from spoken conversation, for a variety of reasons.
